August 17, 2010

After pretty long pause I’m happy to announce that our team is alive and still rocking hard for your amusement. And today I want to tell you about some really hot stuff for your Nokia n900.

Initially started as a project for FRUCT application competition by Tanya Makova, new name in the maemo.org community and Vlad Vasiliev, who is well known as an OMWeather project leader, this application has evolved into one of the most shiny pearls on the scene. Thanks to these two people you’re now able to amaze the audience with your n900 like never before. Instead of showing static wallpapers on your desktops, now you can set almost anything from video files to XScreenSavers. Let me introduce you – Live Wallpaper. Project details with screenshots and video are after the break.

February 1, 2010

As I promissed, today I’d like to present you my first, and lets hope not last, theme for Fremantle and also the default theme for Mer called Marina.

Dark, a bit glossy but calm blueish theme, packed with loopable wallpaper. First 3rd-party theme to be designed from scratch, every UI element is hand drawn (except for loading “flower” and navigation icons :). I really wanted to give it a finished professional look, hope you’ll feel it.

Right now it’s heading to Extras repository and you can vote right here to promote it even faster. You can also report bugs (if any) here or in the t.m.o. discussion thread. But I hope I’ve cleaned all of these, even though it was a tough experience without actual devic, thanks all of you who helped with them.

Anyway, I hope you’ll use it, thanks to Xisdibik some screenshots are waiting for you after the break.

Today I’d like to tell you bout thing that you probably heard of – a theme for Maemo5/Mer called Marina. Thanks to Urho Konttori and his awesome updated Theme Maker – you can make pretty remarkable stuff for Maemo 5. Every widget and every background is changeable. But as for me, insane perfectionist, uber-customizability of Maemo 5 UI takes much time to draw something complex and unique, since you need to change huge ammount of data. Nevertheless, I’ve found some time to work on one theme and I called it “Marina”.

December 22, 2009

One more day is over and we’re getting closer to the new year. I’ve prepaired some really cool stuff for you today — it’s called “Extras Assistant”. We’re developing it with great Nokian Daniel Wilms and his crew. The purpose of this app is to provide additional comfort and ease to the maemo.org Extras browsing, no matter what version of Maemo you’re using. Tasty shots and bref descriptions after the break.

October 29, 2009

N900 release was delayed a bit, but you shouldn’t be upset cause this only means that Nokia cares bout end quality of the product and don’t want to give you half-cooked buggy brick. Meanwhile community developers have more time to polish their existing software (like we’re doing with OMWeather) and even create new one.

Community member Martin Grimme, also known as PyCage is working on FM radio application for n900 and I’ve decided to help him with it and create something visually appealing and easy to use.

But first I’d like to thank everyone that have donated money to our Other Maemo Weather team. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve donated – the fact of your attention itself is very important to us that keeps us on track.

October 21, 2009

Last couple of weeks was full of great news connected with Maemo Community. Great Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, 300 devices for participants, Nokia Developer Device Program revealing with addition of quite positive reviews of n900 (even with pre-production software) – all this stuff is breathing fresh air and blood into Maemo Community, hope we’ll se the results of these hype soon. As for me I have both good and unfortunately bad news so please, read this post right to the end – it’s important. But let’s start with good. Latest OMWeather release, that was connected with Fremantle Stars program was made without my participation (for some really weird reasons, but whatever) but now Stars program is over and I’m back to my duties :)

I’d like to present you the preview of new OMWeather for Fremantle that will bring you fresh ways to view, manage and customize your weather information. Let’s begin with main view, it has lot’s of changes in user interface. (more…)

September 15, 2009

Today I’d like to proudly present you the result of Google Summer of Code developement cycle from my good friend — Max Usachev.

He was working at porting something very useful and unique to the maemo platform — card-based education app called “Mnemosyne” and I’ve gladly helped him with visual appearance of this port and I’d like to show you the results. But first of all some facts bout Mnemosyne itself. (more…)

March 24, 2009

Since our OMWeather team hardly working on Maemo 5 version, I’ve finaly forced myself to learn Adobe Flash technology for better interaction between my brain and programmers :) Dynamic UI prototype can greatly increase whole team productivity: designer will see, if his idea is actually cool and tweak details without waiting for actual code to be done by coders, and programmers can see clearly what designer wants from them, not just “I want this think to ppear like “whoooosh!” and then “baaaam!” Got it?”.

So after 1 day of learning Flash and action Script 3 from ground zero, I came with this super-basic, but still pretty stuff :) Click image to see live demo.